In a recent interview, Ariana Lynn, Principal Analyst at The Fast Mode spoke to Per Kangru, Director of Strategy and Business Development at VIAVI Solutions on the impact of traffic visibility on modern IP networks. Per joins us in a series of discussions with leading networking, analytics and cybersecurity companies, assessing the need for traffic filtering technologies that can deliver real-time, granular application awareness. The series explores how advanced analytics power various network functions amidst the rapid growth in traffic and applications.
Ariana: How do your solutions and products fulfill the demands of today's networks?
Per: The complexity of today’s network architecture, regardless of the type, makes testing essential during network construction, expansion, and monitoring phases. Decades of innovation, partnership, and collaboration with over 4,000 global customers has uniquely qualified VIAVI to address even unique test and assurance challenges. We guarantee performance of hardware and ensure performance of services over the lifecycle of the ecosystem, from lab to turn-up to monitoring.
VIAVI Solutions is also an active participant in over thirty standards bodies and open-source initiatives. But when standards don’t move quickly enough, we anticipate and develop equipment to test evolving infrastructure standards. We also believe in open APIs, so companies can continue to write their own automation code, and low/no-code frameworks for automation.
Ariana: What technologies are most effective in delivering real-time traffic visibility?
Per: To deliver true, real-time traffic visibility, a combination of technologies and tools is required. No single piece is sufficient on its own in today’s network. And regardless of the landscape – whether a standalone enterprise or inside a multi-regional NOC – visibility is as critical as ever to delivering today’s SLAs. A combination could look like this: leveraging physical probes throughout the physical plant/network and interoperable monitoring and sensing software, typically managed in the NOC or SOC, network alarms (links down, breaks, outages, etc.) are fed to AIOps. If there is something like a fiber break, AIOps executes next steps (including local deployment of test assets) and maps it into AIOps, identifying the exact location and notifying relevant stakeholders.
Connections, network performance, and service quality remain consistent across these landscapes, with differences in scale. Uptime reliability becomes more important even as the testing complexity grows. Networks must be tested and monitored consistently to verify throughput and find potential issues before a fault occurs. Automated monitoring solutions should be used to minimize resource demands. Not only does all of this rely on the observability premise to ensure real-time visibility to the end-user, it also functionally relies on real-time traffic visibility.
Per Kangru is Director of Strategy and Business Development at VIAVI Solutions. Per is a seasoned telecoms professional with expertise in Quality of Service (QoS), Quality of Experience (QoE), 5G, Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), and Customer Experience Assurance. He is an active participant in industry forums such as NGMN, TM-Forum, and QuEST Forum.
This interview is a part of The Fast Mode's Traffic Visibility segment, featuring leading networking, analytics and cybersecurity companies and their views on the importance of network intelligence and DPI for today's IP networks. A research report on this topic will be published in June 2024 - for more information, visit here.
